[Update] Changes in Spam Assassin with cPanel 11

[Matt]

Q. How do I disable Spam Assassin in my cPanel account?

A. Spam Assassin is now enabled Globally on ALL accounts and cannot be disabled "per-account."

Q. We are getting emails with ***SPAM*** in the subject line, how to we fix that?

A. Actually, nothing is broken. You can change the score that you receive emails that have their subject rewritten in the Spam Assassin configuration editor. If you do not want any emails to be rewritten, change the score to something above 20.

Q. We no longer have a Spam Box on our accounts.

A. The spam boxes were disabled globally for several reasons, the primary reason was that users spam boxes were becoming so bloated to die user neglect, that their accounts were becoming over quota both at the email account level, and at the cPanel level. When the cPanel level was filled to capacity, many site services ceased to work, so to prevent this, we have disabled spam boxes on the server side.

Q. But I really liked my Spam Boxes, what can I do?

A. Some email readers like Thunderbird have built-in options for processing emails that have Spam Assassin headers. You can also configure other email readers to use custom filters to process mail flagged as spam by Spam Assassin according to your rule-set.

You can also consider setting up a filter in cPanel to look for Spam Assassin headers and forward those to another inbox account on the server side, though we do not recommend this unless you will be maintaining this account regularly.

Q. I have more questions about Spam Assassin.

A. Hit the "Reply" Button and ask them here!

[emaneric]

Up until very recently I was able to "re-write" message headers on all e-mail that Spam Assassin flagged as spam. Then when the e-mail comes into Outlook it can be automatically moved to a different folder based on something like ****SPAM**** being found in the subject line.

This feature appears to have been removed as an option from Spam Assassin in all of my reseller accounts. There is text in the "Configure Spam Assassin" applet in Cpanel that says the following but gives no way to set the option.

"Please note that SpamAssassin is not configured for rewrites. You should check the X-Spam-Bar header for the spam bar in your filter, or for simplicity, you can also check the X-Spam-Status header for Yes or No.
Hint:To filter all mail that SpamAssassin has marked as spam, just choose "SpamAssassin Spam Header", "begins with", and then enter "Yes" in the box.

Hint:To filter all mail that SpamAssassin has marked as with a spam score of 5.0 or greater then choose "SpamAssassin Spam Bar Header", "contains", and then enter "+++++" in the box. (Note: if you wanted match a spam score of 4, you would use ++++. A spam score of three would be +++, etc.)"

Why is this option not available? How can I get it back? This is an important feature for my clients. Now tons of spam is not being properly filtered on my client's PCs.

Please advise.

Thank you,

Eric

[Matt]

Up until very recently I was able to "re-write" message headers on all e-mail that Spam Assassin flagged as spam. Then when the e-mail comes into Outlook it can be automatically moved to a different folder based on something like ****SPAM**** being found in the subject line.

This feature appears to have been removed as an option from Spam Assassin in all of my reseller accounts. There is text in the "Configure Spam Assassin" applet in Cpanel that says the following but gives no way to set the option.

The new Spam Assassin integrated with the new cPanel automatically marks ***SPAM*** to any email flagged as spam. There is no more local configuration to customise the subject line. It will always be marked as ***SPAM***

But what makes Spam Assassin flag an email as Spam?
When you go into cPanel > Mail > Spam Assassin > SpamAssassin Configuration you will see a field called "required_score" you will need to change this value to whatever level you want to get Spam Assassin to start rewriting subject lines as it used to do in the older version of Spam Assassin/cPanel, If it is already at the level you desire, we suggest saving the settings (submit the page) one time to make sure your settings are stored properly.

Please note that SpamAssassin is not configured for rewrites.

Its probably a bit misleading, it is configured for rewrites, just not user-definable subject lines. You can follow the steps above to make the rewrites work again.

[emaneric]

We ran our spam tests again on two GlowHost hosted accounts.

Unfortunately, e-mail that IS being flagged as spam under the new design IS NOT being delivered. After conducting several spam tests, including GTUBE spam tests, none of the e-mails arrived in our mail marked as spam.

We also made sure our spam assassin configuration profiles were set to "Disable Auto-Delete Spam".

One spam test e-mail we sent was bounced back to us indicating it was flagged as spam. So we know the spam filters are working.

We need e-mail flagged as spam to be delivered to our mailboxes so that we can inspect and filter it.

Please advise.

Thank you.

Eric

[Matt]

If you are referring to the GTUBE test patterns found here:

http://spamassassin.apache.org/gtube/

These automatically score higher than 20.0 in Spam Assassin and are rejected immediately at SMTP time. The GTUBE test pattern scores 1000.00 on the spamAssassin Spam Score, scale so it would be automatically rejected.